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Two Smudde siblings. One blog. No apologies.

Overwhelmed by What I Want to Learn

I really enjoyed your post about acting on impulse. I feel its a lesser known wisdom that people don’t take advantage of more often. Being an artist I work on deadlines that are sometimes absurd. In this line of work, sometimes you need to grab whatever appears to you first and just sprint. The toughest part is learning to ignore or overtake your doubt.

You were a pretty studious and organized kid. It was the family joke for a while that you don’t actually need friends or loved ones as long as you have books! Hilarious!

Then you got married and we all had to begrudgingly shut up.

As for me as a kid, I was definitely distracted. I wasn’t a bad student, or a bad kid, or even just unfocused. I use the word distracted because I spent a lot of time and energy finding and utilizing the path of least resistance. I had other priorities! There were like, video games to play, Thundercats to watch, and weekends to look forward to! Who on earth has time for reading, school, books, and planners?

I got middling grades throughout elementary, middle, and high school. Even the first half of college I spent a lot of time just treading water. Not really falling behind, and never really sprinting for any finish line. I didn’t want to fail, but I didn’t care enough to get that A.

And now, long after school is over and college is finished, I kinda, sorta, maybe resent my past self.

Its really unfair and unrealistic to expect a kid to try and please their future selves. It takes away from being a kid. We’ll blame the parents for this one. But looking back I skipped a lot of interesting classes and picked easier topics so I had more time for dumb things in my evening, like bad girlfriends and Kingdom Hearts.

I’m a 3D artist, and as any artist can tell you there are always more techniques to learn and skills to practice. I’m also a college graduate, and as any college graduate can tell you, you almost never learn as much as you needed or wanted to.

So now I’m an adult and now I have found the drive to not tread water, but to run and climb the enormous mountain of stuff I need to learn. Not even need, I want to learn.

There is a list of crap I can list for what I want to learn in 3D. I’d list it all here but it’ll seem like I’m picking words out of the dictionary and turning them into verbs. I need to learn to skin, rig, deform, animate, bake normals and all sorts of other stuff. The techniques I use in my work are what I found work the best in my workflow, and that is fine! But I watch movies like How to Train Your Dragon and Ratatouille and I can only think to myself “I want to learn how to do that! I want to tour these places and work with them to create amazing things!”

Meanwhile I’m building just an insurmountable amount of store fixtures. I’ve made so many fixtures that they could fill a Wal-mart. I’ve built the fixtures that actually belong in a Wal-mart. That’s how my cover letter would go:

Dear Dean Dublois,

I heard that How to Train Your Dragon 3 was announced and I want to be an artist working on the movie. If you have need of someone to create, say, a Wal-mart full of store fixtures for your movie about vikings and dragons, I am your guy!

Regards,

Daniel

I want to create these amazing things! I already get to create super cool designs for specialty sports stores and those are cool, but I could make Toothless. The big problem is that I don’t know how.

Don’t get me wrong, I love what I’m doing in my career, but I think it’s human nature to want more.

And this is just my rant about my career! There is so much about the world I just don’t understand. And I’m trying to learn!

Seriously though, I didn’t understand the financial crisis in Greece, and I don’t understand the refugee problem in Syria and Europe. Why did we go to war in Iraq? People try and give these things really succinct causes and effects but the reality is that humans simplify because generally they are too large to fathom.

I fundamentally don’t understand the pros and cons of immigration in America. I live here. I should know, shouldn’t I? Politics, man. That’s its own little wormhole. The police situations in Ferguson and other similar situations. The internet and the media hype it, but is there a bias? Am I getting the whole story?

If only we had some sort of institution in place that would educate a kid from age 6 to 18 about all the goings on in the world. Man that would be handy.

I want to be well educated individual. I don’t want to be manipulated by bias and agenda. I don’t necessarily believe that everything is trying to trick me, but I think there is value on being able to teach myself and form my own unique opinions and ideas.

Its just so much. Its so intimidating.

I’d better go relax myself by playing games, watching Thundercats, and thinking about the weekend.